


Good Night

by rosa_acicularis



Series: Amor Mundi [2]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-29
Updated: 2013-11-29
Packaged: 2018-01-02 23:06:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1062731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosa_acicularis/pseuds/rosa_acicularis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor, down the rabbit hole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Contains disturbing content. References events of _Do I Twist, Do I Fold_.

_What did I dream?  
I do not know;  
The fragments fly like chaff.  
Yet strange my mind  
Was tickled so,  
I cannot help but laugh._

Traditional  


 

  
The night he burned the Master’s body to ash, the Doctor dreamed.  


 

  
  
A house by the sea. He can hear the surf as he wanders from room to room, finding each of them empty. The air tastes stale, and when he tries to open a window he discovers it has been sealed. He could pull the sonic screwdriver from his pocket and force the lock but instead he pauses, listening to the soft murmur of voices from a distant room. He follows the sound to a half-open door. The iron of the doorknob is cold in his hand and he stands in the corridor, watching.   
  
A boy in white and black robes waits in the middle of the sitting room, fidgeting as the woman kneeling before him straightens his collar. “One, two, three,” the boy counts under his breath, his round face twisted in concentration. “Then comes four, I’m sure, but…”  
  
“Five next, I think,” Martha says, brushing his fringe from his eyes. “I wish you would let me cut it. I never can see you properly.”  
  
“That’s the whole point,” the boy says. He looks up, sees the Doctor, and grins. “He’s here.”   
  
Martha turns her head, and her smile is the first familiar thing he’s seen. “Bit late, aren’t you?” she asks, and he steps into the room.   
  
“Didn’t know I was expected.” He frowns when he notices her sharply starched black and white uniform and the polite white lace pinned to her hair. “Why are you dressed like that?”   
  
The boy rolls his eyes. “Her idea of a joke.”  
  
Martha laughs and sits back on her heels. “Hardly. I’d much rather wear my own clothes.”   
  
The boy stares at her, his expression hard and searching. “Then why aren’t you?”   
  
Her smile fades. “I should think,” she says, “that you of all people would understand the value of a good disguise.”  
  
The room has changed, the light from the windows gone pale and strange. Martha picks a piece of lint from the boy’s sleeve. The boy meets the Doctor’s gaze. “She doesn’t like me much.”  
  
The Doctor feels he should be surprised by the madness he finds in the little boy’s eyes, but he isn’t. “Can’t really blame her, can you?”   
  
“Perhaps not,” the boy concedes. He turns to Martha. “I’ve lost my place,” he says, and she sighs.   
  
“Five. You stopped at five, this time.” She turns to the Doctor, her expression strangely unreadable. “He’s very strong in maths. Gold stars for excellence and–”  
  
“Six for gold!” the boy cries gleefully, dancing out of Martha’s reach in his excitement. “One for sorrow, two for joy–”  
  
“Three for a girl,” she adds.  
  
“Four for a boy,” the Doctor finds himself saying, and they both smile at him.  
  
“Five for silver…” The boy points to Martha, who gives an awkward little half-bow. “Yes, that’s right, I’m sure of it. Five for silver and six for…” He looks around the room and scowls. “She’s never here when it’s time to be counted.”   
  
Martha shrugs, obviously untroubled. “You know how stubborn she can be.”   
  
“That’s no excuse,” the boy complains. “She never answers when I call.”   
  
“Who?” the Doctor tries to ask, but the word escapes his lips as little more than a puff of air.   
  
Martha shakes her head. “We’ll just have to continue without her. We’ve done it before.” She turns to the Doctor. “You’re rather good with numbers. Would you like to help?”  
  
The boy snorts. “Are you joking? He always wants to help.”   
  
The Doctor takes a few more hesitant steps into the room, plimsolls squeaking on the wooden floorboards. “If I can.”  
  
“Come in, then. We don’t bite.” She glances at the boy warily. “Well, I don’t.”   
  
He walks to the middle of the room where Martha kneels on a worn rug. Unable to stop himself, he reaches down and gently removes the hairpins that hold her white maid’s cap in place. He drops the bit of lace and cloth to the floor, and then pushes it beneath a nearby armchair with the toe of his shoe. “That’s better.”   
  
She grins up at him and for the first time he sees the shadow in her eyes.   
  
“I don’t see any difference,” the boy says, petulant.  
  
“That is because you are a little boy,” Martha says patiently, “and I am not.” She stands, and the Doctor cannot decide if he has shrunk or she has grown impossibly tall, because though she looks no different she towers above him, graceful and lean.   
  
“You’ve changed,” the Doctor says, his voice small, and he wonders if she can even hear him.  
  
“Oh, I haven’t,” Martha assures him. “Though I’m sure it seems that way to you.” She turns to the boy. “I would tell you to behave, but as a general rule I try not to say foolish things.”   
  
The boy smirks. “Time’s almost up.”   
  
Martha gives the Doctor an exasperated look, a wonderfully familiar expression that says, ‘Are you and I the only people in the universe who haven’t gone completely mad?’ It means _you and me against the world_ and _Smith and Jones_ , and has always been his favourite of her many faces.   
  
He shrugs and smiles and watches her walk past him and out the door. He cannot hear her footsteps as she walks away.   
  
“You shouldn’t feel guilty,” the boy says.   
  
The Doctor turns to look down at him. “Oh?”  
  
“She’s going to be a doctor. You taught her all sorts of things.”  
  
“Did I?” he asks faintly and stares at the empty doorway. “Like what?”  
  
The boy stands beside him. “Like leaving.” A small hand slips into his. “You were going to help me count.”   
  
The Doctor goes down on one knee and looks into the boy’s eyes. “You can’t fool me, you know,” he says, his voice slow and serious. “I see you in there.”  
  
The boy grins mischievously. “I _can_ fool you. I have and I will and it’ll be _fun_.”  
  
“You can’t,” he says, and it hurts. “Not ever again.”  
  
The child laughs. “Boy, are you stupid.” He grabs a handful of the Doctor’s hair and pulls, hard. The Doctor winces. “One, two, three, four, five,” the boy sing-songs. “Once I caught a fish alive. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten — then I let it go again.”  
  
“Why did you let it go?” the Doctor asks.   
  
“Because it bit my finger so.” There’s a short pause and the boy tightens his grip and tugs impatiently.  
  
“Which finger did it bite?” the Doctor says quickly.  
  
“The little finger, on the right.” The boy’s face contorts into a sharp, hungry grin and he lets his hand fall from the Doctor’s head. “She was right. You are good with numbers.”  
  
“What are you counting?” he asks, feeling as though he should already know the answer.   
  
Sure enough, the boy gives him a withering look. “Chances, of course. What else?” He begins to count on his short fingers. “Daemons and sea devils and Daleks. Gallifrey and Traken, Logopolis and Earth. Flames from the depths and the end of world at the stroke of midnight.” He frowns, staring at nine fingers spread wide. “I’m forgetting a few, aren’t I?”  
  
“Yes,” the Doctor says, his voice hoarse. “A few.”  
  
“I suppose it doesn’t really matter,” the boy says, meeting the Doctor’s eyes. “However you count it, ten chances are more than one.”  
  
He swallows hard. “Nine. You counted nine.”   
  
The boy unfurls the remaining finger. “A ship in the sky. A year of death and conquest and the sweet laughter of children you sent to nothingness. To No Place.” He giggles and something cold and rotten rises in the back of the Doctor’s throat. “And you forgave me.”   
  
“No.” The Doctor stumbles to his feet, shaking his head. “I don’t understand. I don’t know what that means.”  
  
“You do. You just don’t want to.” The boy smiles, revealing the tiny pearls of his teeth. “Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. No second chances - you’re that sort of man.”   
  
The Doctor staggers backwards, the urge to escape pounding like the rush of blood in his ears _(like the drumbeat)_ but he cannot look away from that smile. He does not want to.   
  
He stumbles, falling into the armchair, and chokes as he nearly swallows a mouthful of sand. The wind whips his hair and stings his eyes. He coughs and spits and, dragging a hand across his mouth, pulls himself upright. From the bluff on which he stands he can see the ocean, grey and rough in the distance. White sand stretches far into the horizon in either direction. A lone figure stands on the beach staring out at the water, slate grey coat flapping in the wind.   
  
The Doctor slides down the steep incline to the flat expanse that leads to the sea. He runs towards the figure, kicking up sand with each step. “Jack!” he calls into the wind.   
  
Jack turns, his hands in his pockets. The corner of his mouth quirks upwards. “Took you long enough,” he says when the Doctor reaches his side.   
  
“There’s a reason for the existence of a subgenre of horror dealing exclusively with evil children,” the Doctor says, still panting slightly from his run.   
  
“They’re creepy as hell?”   
  
He wants to laugh, but the gritty taste of sand lingers in his mouth and he is suddenly sure that he is not supposed to be here. “Jack, I have to get back to that house.”  
  
His friend turns to stare out at the sea again. “What for?”   
  
“He’s there. I should be too.”   
  
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jack says flatly, his face empty. His eyes are fixed on the horizon.   
  
The Doctor opens his mouth to argue but discovers that there is nothing to say. He frowns. “I was sure that it did.” He watches Jack’s closed face for a long moment, then follows his gaze and looks out over the grey-green waves. “Why are you here?”   
  
Jack chuckles, but it is a hard, unpleasant sound. “You don’t even see them, do you?”  
  
“See what?” he asks. Before the words have left his lips, a line of white appears, stretching across the colourless sand, only slightly paler than the beach itself. He does not need to look down the coastline to know that it reaches far into the distance, continuing for miles. Perhaps farther. He closes his eyes and the sight of still, human faces beneath white sheets follows him, luminescent against the darkness of his eyelids. “War dead,” he says softly.   
  
“Civilians,” Jack snaps back. The Doctor opens his eyes and watches the cording of muscle in the man’s neck as he struggles to control his anger. “That was no war.”  
  
The Doctor’s gaze returns to the long string of bodies. He thinks of skies in flame, the day Japan burned. The sheets hiding the dead do not ripple in the wind. “Why are they here?” he asks.  
  
“The tide will take them when it rises. Then they’ll be gone, like it never happened.”   
  
The Doctor flinches at the clear note of accusation in his voice. “It didn’t happen, Jack,” he says, stung. “These people never died. It was undone.”  
  
“You’re right. They never died.” Jack turns and meets his eyes. “But he still killed them.”  
  
He has never seen anger like this in Jack’s eyes — not when he stared down dictators or monsters or thieves, and certainly never directed at him. Jack is not a foolish man, but his unflagging love of the Doctor borders on folly. _(What he did, what he’s done, and the man will insist on forgiveness.)_ The Doctor knows this, just as he knows he will always use it to his own advantage. This doesn’t mean he treasures it any less — he’s just that sort of man.   
  
So when disgust and anger make this Jack-who-is-not-Jack’s blue eyes grow pale and cold, he is not surprised by the eerie sensation of looking into a mirror that is not now but then. He recognizes that anger: Once upon a time it had been his and he’d spent his days feeding it pieces of the little he’d had left until it consumed him like a cancer. He meets the man in the leather coat’s gaze and the steel blue eyes that look back at him were _(are)_ his own.  
  
“Not you again,” the Doctor says as if it’s funny, though it isn’t.   
  
“Idiot,” the solider-who-is-no-longer-Jack says.   
  
The Doctor can do nothing but nod at himself in agreement. The man he once was looks down, and for the first time the Doctor feels the cold salt water seeping through the canvas of his plimsolls. The tide has come in.   
  
The blue-eyed man folds his arms across his chest and looks out over the waves, ignoring the water lapping at their feet. The dead are gone. They were never there.  
  
“Please tell me I don’t have to explain this to you,” the man says, one hand gesturing impatiently to the sea.   
  
The Doctor shrugs, knowing it will annoy him and gaining some small satisfaction from that. “Maybe you do.”  
  
“Maybe you should shut it.”   
  
These terse words are followed by the sort of awkward silence you can only have with yourself. The hems of his trouser legs are soaked, heavy with brine, and the Doctor looks anywhere but at the dark figure beside him. After a moment he spots the pale shadow of the waxing moon in the sky. He smiles and thinks of Martha, of standing on the surface and looking back at the Earth, blue and beautiful in orbit.   
  
“I see the moon, and the moon sees me,” he says, and then his smile fades. “The moon sees the somebody I’d like to see.”  
  
“I don’t like riddles,” the blue-eyed man snaps.   
  
“I remember.” He drags a hand over his face and tries not to think about the fact that his feet have gone numb. “The sun. At night, you want the light of the sun but all you can see is its reflection.”  
  
“In the moon.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Well,” the past drawls, “that’s just stupid.”  
  
The Doctor stares down at the water foaming white around his knees. “You’d be surprised. Things change.” He glances up at himself. “There’s an undertow on beaches like these, you know.”   
  
The man arches an eyebrow. “You afraid of a little damp?”  
  
“No, but I’m not exactly wild about drowning, either.” A wave retreats and the Doctor takes a few stumbling steps backwards. “You coming?”  
  
“What do you think?” the man replies, his voice thick with disdain.  
  
The Doctor gives him a sad smile. “It never hurts to ask.” He turns to go, but then pauses. “Do you know the way back to the house? I have to find him.”  
  
The blue-eyed man looks over his shoulder, studying him carefully for a long moment. Then he looks back out to the sea. “It doesn’t change anything, you know,” he says softly, but there is steel in his voice. “One life doesn’t undo what I did.”  
  
“It means I’m not alone.”  
  
“You’d be surprised,” he replies. The water rises. “Don’t go looking. He’ll find you.”   
  
The words are a dismissal and, without a backwards glance, the Doctor leaves him behind. He sloughs up the beach, clumsily splashing through the cold water. His legs are numb and heavy, and he’s exhausted and panting when he finally collapses at the foot of the dunes. Again he is face first in the sand, but this time he presses his cheek to the ground and lies still, shivering in the wind.   
  
It happens slowly. He doesn’t notice the building heat beating down on him until the sun has dried his suit so thoroughly that he can feel the rasp of salt against his skin. He squints into blazing daylight and sees a pair of bare, pale feet, ten toes digging into the sand just beyond the tip of his nose. The toenails are painted a vivid, sunflower yellow, the varnish slightly chipped.   
  
“Well, that’s one way to work on your tan,” Rose says, and he cannot help but reach out and trace the dip and curve of her ankle with his fingertip. “That tickles,” she comments, but doesn’t laugh.   
  
“I didn’t think you’d be here,” he manages to say, and it feels woefully inadequate.   
  
“What, and miss a party like this?” She crouches on the white sand by his side and he takes a moment to drink in the sight of her. Her hair is long, a mess of tangles in the wind, her roots still dark. She wears a ragged, baggy blue jumper, her jeans rolled to just below her knees, and though she smiles, her face is stained with black trails of mascara, a tattoo of tears long past. “You look like you’ve had a rough time of it.” Her gaze sweeps his prone figure. “New suit, I see.”  
  
He’s about to disagree when he notices the solid blue of his sleeve. “I suppose it is,” he sighs. In his long life he has learned to savour the unexpected and extraordinary, but the extraordinary has gone too far when it interferes with his wardrobe. He sits and brushes the sand from his shoulders and trouser legs.   
  
She sits and leans over to help, her hands skimming over his now blue lapels. “I like it.”   
  
He smiles at her. “I’m glad.”  
  
“And I’m glad that you’re glad.” She laughs and hugs her knees to her chest. “We could do that all day.”  
  
“We have,” he replies, remembering. After a moment he reaches out and brushes his thumb over the black marks running down her cheeks. “Rose,” he says, his voice soft, “what are these?”  
  
“Not what you think,” she replies gently, as if speaking to a child. She reaches out, mirroring his gesture, and her fingers come away from his face wet with ink. He stares at her hand, transfixed by the dark liquid running down her fingers and pooling in the creases of her palm. When he looks up, her face is clean and pale.   
  
“What does it say?” he asks roughly, feeling for the first time the cool, slick sensation of ink against the skin of his face. Where there is ink there are words, he knows, _(grief written on his face like a story)_ but she shakes her head.  
  
“They’re just salt, Doctor. They don’t have to say anything.” She rubs her fingers together, still dripping with ink, and dark spots rain down on the sand below. “If all the world was paper,” she says, “and all the seas were ink.” She stands and takes two steps backward, her footprints marking the sand. “If all the trees,” she continues blithely, “were bread and cheese, what would we have to drink?”   
  
Another step back and her heels rest on the pointed toes of a pair of black dress shoes. A black-clad arm slides around her waist and the Master answers, “Why, the blood of innocents, of course.” He grins at the Doctor from over her shoulder. “Too easy. Give me another.”   
  
Rose does not react to his voice or his touch — instead, she watches the Doctor with wide eyes, waiting. “Don’t you have the answer?” she asks, untroubled by the Master’s embrace. “You always do.”   
  
“Step away,” the Doctor says, rising to his feet, his voice cold with fury. “Now.”  
  
“Or you’ll what?” the Master replies. “Snuggle me to death?”   
  
“You’re already dead,” the Doctor snaps, and even now he grieves.  
  
The arm around Rose tightens, but she doesn’t so much as flinch. The Master rolls his eyes. “Oh _please_. Like that’s ever stopped me.”  
  
“Doctor?” She takes a step forward, slipping easily out of the Master’s arms, and her hands settle on her hips. “Are you even listening to a word I’m saying?”  
  
“No,” the Doctor says, his eyes fixed on the man who died in his arms hours before.   
  
“You should be.” Rose’s tone is suddenly grim. “I remember things you’ve forgotten.”  
  
The Master snickers. “Like what? How to nick cheap mascara from the shop round the corner and tuck your miserable, sloppily drunk mother into bed at night?”   
  
The Doctor feels a wonderful, fierce anger build inside him, and he lurches toward the Master. Rose stops him, pressing a hand to his chest, and tries unsuccessfully to meet his gaze. “One for sorrow, two for joy,” she says urgently, her fingernails scratching against the silk of his tie. “Three for a girl, four for a boy. If you’re looking at him, you won’t see it coming.”   
  
“No,” the Master says with a wry grin. “He won’t.”   
  
“Listen to me,” she pleads, but he has felt so empty for so long and now he is full and he cannot look away from the Master’s smile. “Please, you have to listen. Five for silver, six–”  
  
Her words are interrupted by an impossibly loud crack, and when the Master’s hands leave Rose’s face she slumps to the ground, her neck twisted at an unnatural angle.   
  
The Master nudges the body with the toe of one well-polished shoe. “Stupid whore,” he says, and smiles. “Shall we dump her into the sea with the others?”  
  
The Doctor cannot move. If this were real _(and suddenly he is sure it is not)_ , he thinks he would be doing something, saying something, but instead he is frozen, rooted in place. He stares down at her open, empty eyes and thinks, _She’ll get sand in her hair. She hates that._  
  
Then the sand beneath their feet _(beneath the corpse)_ begins to shift, and he staggers backward, away from her. She is sinking, slowly being swallowed by pale earth, and he knows this isn’t real, this isn’t her, but he falls to his knees and grabs for her arm, her hand, her fingers. A strong, thin arm hooks him around the waist and drags him back, pulling him to a safe distance despite his struggles. The body disappears and the sand is left smooth, undisturbed.   
  
“It’s all right,” Martha murmurs, her arms still locked around him. “I promise.”   
  
“That didn’t happen,” he says, and though he knows he’s right his voice shakes. “Tell me it didn’t happen.”   
  
She pulls away slightly. “I don’t need to,” she says, and looks pointedly to where the Master stood only a moment before.   
  
Now he lies crumpled on the sand, his hands over his face. Rose stands over him, her arms folded across her chest. She looks bored. “Honestly,” she says to the twitching figure at her feet, “it’s the same song and dance every time. When is it going to sink into your thick Time Lord skull?” She crouches beside him and tenderly rests her hand on his head. He flinches. “Remember this,” she says with a terrible gentleness. “In the end, I always win.” Rose looks over at them. “All right, Martha?”   
  
Martha nods. “He’s fine.” She glances at him, smiling slightly. “You are fine, aren’t you?”   
  
He stares at her, speechless.   
  
Martha laughs. “I think you broke him,” she calls out to Rose, who stands and grins at them.  
  
“Give him a minute. He’ll get over it.” She steps over the Master’s prone body and walks to them, brushing sand from her jumper. “Every bloody time,” she mutters to herself. “Sand in places you wouldn’t believe.”   
  
Martha gets to her feet. “Tell me about it. Last time the bastard got me, I found an actual hermit crab buried in my back pocket.” She frowns at the memory. “Made a horrible noise when I sat down.”   
  
The Doctor gapes up at the women — one blonde and rumpled and barefoot, the other elegant and serene in her crisp white lab coat. They exchange an indecipherable look and begin to laugh.   
  
“What?” he asks, feeling entirely out of his depth. “What is it?”  
  
“The…the look on your face,” Rose sputters, leaning on Martha’s shoulder for support. “It’s just priceless.”  
  
“Sorry,” Martha says, though her wide grin doesn’t look the least bit repentant. “If it makes you feel any better, we did fight over you at first.”  
  
Rose attempts a sober nod but her smile breaks through. “For a while, actually. Martha’s a hair-puller.”   
  
The other woman rolls her eyes. “Only to keep you from biting me.”  
  
“But now we get on wonderfully. We even have friendly nicknames for each other, don’t we, Dr. Jones?”  
  
“We certainly do.” Martha grins. “Chav.”  
  
“Swot.”  
  
“Slut.”  
  
“Rebound.”  
  
“Corpse.”  
  
The sunlight dims and for a moment Rose’s face is again slack and drained of colour, her eyes glassy. Then both women burst into peals of laughter and it is as if he has only imagined her sudden decay.  
  
“Corpse!” Rose repeats, still laughing helplessly. “She gets me with that one every time.”  
  
“But this is impossible.” The Doctor staggers to his feet. “You two have never, will never meet.”   
  
“Rose, stop,” Martha whispers, elbowing her in the side. “I think we’re damaging his fragile male ego.”   
  
Rose claps a hand over her mouth and stares at him, her wide eyes sparkling. “Sorry,” she says through her fingers, her voice muffled. A moment later, she hiccups.   
  
The Doctor runs a hand through his hair, trying to clear the frustration from his unusually cluttered, uncooperative mind. “I don’t understand any of this,” he says through gritted teeth. “What’s happening?”   
  
“At the moment?” Rose says, uncovering her mouth. “Nothing.”  
  
“But just you wait,” Martha adds, waving a finger in his face.   
  
Rose sighs. “Oh, the waiting is the worst.”  
  
“The very worst,” Martha agrees. “Still, it’s only ever a matter of time–”  
  
“Or a matter of space.”  
  
“Or neither.”  
  
“Yes,” Rose says, nodding, her expression one of mock solemnity. “Sometimes it’s a matter of zeppelins.”  
  
“Or angels.”  
  
“Or Daleks.” They pause and exchange a significant look. “Quite often,” Rose says slowly, “quite often it’s a matter of Daleks.”  
  
Martha gives her shoulder a quick, comforting squeeze. “Three hundred and sixty-five grains of sand,” she says. “A year of waiting and silence and standing still, and now…” the sentence trails off, unfinished.  
  
A grin blossoms across Rose’s face. “Oh, do you think?” she asks Martha eagerly.  
  
Martha beams. “Well, it’s never failed us before.” Then she is gone, vanished, leaving behind only empty footprints in the sand.   
  
The Doctor swings around, searching for her, but the beach is empty. “I don’t understand. Where did she…”  
  
Rose stares out to sea, her expression distant. “Don’t worry. She’s gotten very good at it.” She doesn’t turn to him but reaches out and presses one hand to his chest, curling her fingers around his tie. Her lips curve in a small, sad smile. “It’s a trick I never learned.”  
  
The Doctor takes her by the elbow and steps closer, willing her to look back at him. “Rose, I know he’s still here. I need to find him.”  
  
She releases his tie and presses two fingers to his lips. “Hush,” she says, and her grin is at once sweet and terrible. “It’s time to run.”


	2. Chapter 2

A clock chimes — once, twice, three times. The Doctor reaches for Rose, but he is alone in a dim corridor. A nearby grandfather clock continues its gentle ticking and the house smells of old wood and dead air. A few steps away, a door is open.   
  
From within the room an eerily familiar voice calls, “Don’t just stand there. Come in if you’re coming.”  
  
The Doctor steps into the doorway and the man behind the desk looks up from his work. He wears a grey three-piece suit, a bow tie, and a grim expression. “Brilliant,” the man with his face says dryly. “It’s you.”  
  
The Doctor looks about the dark study, his hands in his pockets. “Bit dreary, isn’t it? Don’t you have a lamp?”  
  
John Smith frowns. “I suppose you could do better?”  
  
“Well, I could buy myself a lamp. Or build one out of a potato, if it came to that.” He feels better, somehow, now that he’s on solid ground, with creaking wooden floorboards beneath his feet. He walks over to the desk and picks up the nearest book, opening it to find the pages blank. “You don’t like me much, do you?” he asks casually.  
  
Smith sits back in his chair and studies him through half-lidded eyes. “I don’t see why it should matter.”  
  
“I don’t suppose it does.”   
  
“But you want to know anyway.” Smith closes his eyes and rubs absently at his temple, and suddenly the Doctor feels every inch the wayward schoolboy. “No, Doctor. I do not like you.”  
  
The Doctor smiles weakly. “I’m something of an acquired taste. Once you get to know me–”  
  
Smith’s eyes fly open and his usually mild features are fierce. “I know you. I have seen your life, your endless wandering and the destruction that follows in your wake. I have seen the joy you take in it, and it disgusts me.” Smith stands, his knuckles pressing whitely into the surface of his desk. “You are a careless fool, a coward without honour, discipline, or faith. You are as cold and unfeeling as stone, sir, and despite your physical abnormalities, I am sure you are _quite_ heartless.”   
  
The Doctor blinks, speechless for a long moment. “So you won’t be heading up the next meeting of my fan club, then?”  
  
Smith smiles briefly but it does not reach his eyes. He sits. “I have assignments to mark.”  
  
“But this doesn’t make sense. How can you hate me?” The Doctor perches on the edge of the desk. “You’re not some other, separate person — you’re part of me. A part of my mind.”   
  
“And you don’t hate yourself?”  
  
“Well,” the Doctor drawls, “that’s another conversation entirely.” He pauses. “Though an interesting one.”   
  
“Then perhaps you’d be so kind as to go and have it somewhere else?”  
  
The Doctor slips off the desk and runs his fingers through his hair, feeling the grit of sand against his scalp. “I’m looking for someone. He’s–”   
  
“The laughing man,” Smith interrupts flatly. “Yes, I’ve seen him.” His expression shifts, and suddenly he looks unsettled. “He says the most shocking things. I don’t understand but half of it.” The Doctor notes the faint blush of the other man’s cheeks and can’t help but think it bizarre to see that look of Edwardian prudery on his own face.  
  
“Yes, he does that. Do you know where he’s gone?”  
  
Smith’s eyes narrow. “What could you possibly want with him? He’s dead.”  
  
“So are you,” the Doctor points out, losing patience. “Look, I’m sorry, but it’s important. I have to find him.”  
  
“He’ll find you,” Smith says simply. “He always does.” He stands and buttons his suit coat, smoothing his lapel in an unconscious gesture. “But I may have something that will interest you in the interim.” He crosses the room and removes the heavy grey dustcover from a gramophone, a massive, antique affair with a yawning brass-lipped mouth. He lifts the needle.   
  
“You’re very helpful all of a sudden,” the Doctor says, his curiosity piqued despite the persistent, restless need to find what he’s lost.   
  
John Smith smiles, a chilling glint of teeth. “You’d be surprised.” The record begins to spin, and he settles the needle into a groove.   
  
As the record plays, there is the fizzling of static and the low, indistinct murmur of his own voice. A familiar, feminine laugh, and then the words become clear, like an image lurching into focus.   
  
“…never just the one story, you know. A thousand stories, a thousand _once upon a time_ s, _happily ever after_ s and _that’s why you stay out of the woods_ es all interweaving and intertwining and…well…” His recorded voice trails off.  
  
The laugh again. “Well?” a warm, alto voice prompts. In French.   
  
“Well, I was going to say ‘intercoursing’, but that’s not exactly a word, is it? Copulating! Yes, copulating. Because you take the stories you know, you rub them together hard enough, shoot off a few sparks, and eventually a whole host of new stories are born, and they’re the same princesses and lost little girls and hungry wolves, but they’re entirely different. Evolution.” There is a brief pause. “Why is it that whenever I talk to you, suddenly everything is about sex?”   
  
Reinette’s laugh echoes in the dim study, and his breath catches. “I couldn’t begin to imagine. You were going to tell me a story.”  
  
“No, you already know the story. I was going to ask you to tell it to me.”  
  
There is a crackling, white silence. “You said there were thousands of versions. Thousands of endings.”  
  
“There are,” his recorded self replies soberly. “What ending do you know?”  
  
Reinette sighs, the sound like a whisper. “She dies.”  
  
“Devoured.” He hears the hardness in his own voice.   
  
“By the wolf, yes. It is the price she pays, for talking to a stranger. The woods are a dangerous place.” There is a pause. “Are there stories in which she is saved?”   
  
“By a passing woodcutter, by a huntsman.” Then he adds with something like hope, “Sometimes she saves herself.”  
  
“But we will never know for sure,” she says, voice rich with her impossible understanding of the things he keeps hidden. “You try not to think about that story.”  
  
The record spins silently for several moments. The light from the windows has faded; the room is dark. His reply, when it comes, is low and uneven. “It’s not a story, Reinette. I just like to pretend it is.”  
  
The gramophone falls silent. The Doctor walks over and lifts the needle. John Smith is gone, and he stands alone in the room. In the corridor, the grandfather clock chimes. He counts silently. After the seventh chime, there is silence.   
  
“One for sorrow, two for joy,” the Doctor whispers to the empty room. “Three for a girl, and four for a boy. Five for the moon, six for the sun–”  
  
“You’re mucking it up,” a voice like a boy’s says from behind him, but when he turns there is no one there.   
  
And in the distance, he hears an eerie, melodic sound — like the creak of the house in the sea wind turned to song. He strides out of the room and down the corridor, following the unearthly noise. As he grows nearer, the voice — for it is a voice — grows clear. Suddenly, he stops mid-step.   
  
The voice is Jack’s, and he is belting a late 20th century Broadway show tune at the top of his immortal lungs.   
  
“Nothing’s quite so clear now; feel you’ve lost your way,” Jack sings as the Doctor approaches a warmly lit room. “But you are not alone, believe me, no one is–” He stops abruptly when the Doctor appears in the doorway. “Doctor!” he cries, his grin wide and welcoming. “You’ve been missing the party.” Sure enough, there are a number of empty, suspiciously unlabeled bottles littered across the long dining room table at which Jack sits. Jack fills an empty glass from the remaining bottle with a clear, rather sluggish liquid and slides it across the table to him. “We were wondering when you’d show up.”  
  
“Oh, thank god,” a familiar voice slurs from the floor. The Doctor looks down to see a fashionable pair of black heels sticking out from under the dining table. “You have to save me. He won’t stop singing Sondheim.”   
  
The Doctor crouches down and gently pokes one of the shoes. “Martha? Are you all right?”  
  
“She’s completely rat arsed,” Jack explains.   
  
“Am not,” she counters, and the Doctor hears her smack the Captain’s leg. “And you sound too American to say things like that.”   
  
“Fine.” Jack smiles at the Doctor. “She’s, like, totally wasted, dude.”  
  
“That’s better.” Martha’s face pops up at the other side of the table, her chin resting on the edge. “I am not drunk,” she tells the Doctor gravely, listing slightly to one side.   
  
“Yes, heaven forbid you should let yourself have some fun for once,” Jack mutters, and she glares at him.   
  
“I have fun. I saved the planet. How is that not fun?” A moment later, her expression crumbles. “Oh god. I _am_ drunk.” She slumps back to the floor.   
  
The Doctor sits in the nearest chair and inspects his drink warily. “Jack, what is this?”  
  
“Alcohol,” he replies with a Hollywood grin, his elbows resting on the table, shirtsleeves rolled to his forearms. “The _effective_ kind.”  
  
Out of sight, Martha groans. “Intoxication has markedly deleterious effects upon the chemical reactions of the human brain.”  
  
Jack shrugs. “So does sex.”  
  
“I need these brain cells. I haven’t picked up a textbook in over a year.” She begins to giggle. “Think I could add ‘post-apocalyptic apostle’ to my CV?”  
  
The Doctor reaches for the half-empty bottle of effective alcohol and sniffs the mouth. “It smells like roast beef,” he says, and Jack shrugs again.  
  
“Maybe it was tired of smelling like clocks.” He leans back and empties his glass in one long drink. His lips pucker and he shakes his head. “Yowser. Just what the doctor ordered.”  
  
“Did he?” Martha asks from under the table, sounding sleepy.  
  
He shouldn’t stay here, he knows. There’s a whole house to search, room upon room of creaky furniture and moth-eaten upholstery, but it’s warm here and the lamps are bright. Jack is smiling and Martha is humming show tunes under her breath, and he can afford to stay for just one drink.   
  
The Doctor takes a pull from his glass. The liquid is heavy on his tongue and tastes like nothing at all. For a moment, the room around him blurs. He blinks — once, twice, three times — and everything clears. Tied to the neck of the bottle with a thin piece of twine is a flimsy, rectangular bit of paper that was not there before. It reads, DRINK ME.  
  
In the distance, waves beat against the shore. The ocean swells.  
  
“Oh dear,” the Doctor says.   
  
“Oh dear,” he hears Martha murmur happily. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”  
  
“Jack,” he says, keeping his voice carefully even, “where did you find this bottle?”  
  
“What bottle?” Jack asks.   
  
Sure enough, the bottle is gone. In its place stands a rather irate brown hen.   
  
The Doctor opens his mouth to comment on this unexpected development, but before he can speak the hen leaps, wings unfurled, from the table and flees out the door.   
  
He turns to Jack, who is fiddling with his braces, a look of intense concentration marring his chiseled features. “Things like that aren’t supposed to happen,” the Doctor says, fairly certain that this is true. “Bottles are bottles and hens are hens.”  
  
“You’d be surprised,” Jack says, winking. “When,” he continues portentously, pulling his braces away from his chest with his thumbs, “is a bottle not a bottle?”  
  
Martha snorts. “Oh, that’s too easy. Give us a bit of a challenge, would you?”  
  
Jack releases the braces and they snap back to his chest. “Easy for you, maybe. Easy for me.” He turns to the Doctor, his expression polite and distant. “Still, you’re supposed to have the answer. She’ll be terribly disappointed if you don’t.”  
  
There is a rustle of clothing from beneath the table. “No, I won’t,” Martha says quickly.  
  
Jack smiles at the tabletop. “Not you, honey.”  
  
There’s a short silence. “Right. I knew that. I always knew that.” She laughs faintly. “I don’t suppose there’s any more to drink?”   
  
The Doctor clears his throat. “The last bottle seems to have…flown the coop.”  
  
Martha sighs. “Pity. I had my heart set on an egg white omelet.” Then she calls out, “Oi, Jack! When is an egg not an egg?”  
  
Jack rolls his eyes. “She thinks she’s clever,” he says to the Doctor, but the words are faint. The waves, distant though they are, have grown louder.   
  
“Do you hear–” the Doctor begins to ask, but Martha interrupts with an annoyed squeak.   
  
“I _am_ clever!” Her face appears on the other side of the table again, her eyes fierce and bright. “Think about it. When is a bottle not a bottle, and an egg not an egg?”   
  
The Doctor looks to Jack, but the other man offers him no assistance. “When they’ve turned into chickens?” he guesses feebly.  
  
His friends stare at him blankly for a long moment, their wide eyes unblinking. Eventually, Jack breaks the silence. “You were right, Martha,” he says slowly. “He thinks we haven’t noticed.”  
  
The Doctor frowns. “Haven’t noticed what?”   
  
Martha disappears again beneath the table, shaking her head. “Honestly,” he hears her say, “how thick does he think we are?”   
  
Jack snorts. “Humans.”   
  
“Humans,” Martha echoes.   
  
The Doctor stands and presses his palms flat on the table. His head echoes with the rolling drumbeat of sea against sand. “Haven’t noticed what?” he asks sharply.   
  
“That you’re not real, of course.” Jack grins, and his even, perfect teeth gleam in the lamplight. “Did you think we wouldn’t figure it out?”   
  
The Doctor takes a slow step back from the dining table. “What are you–”  
  
“You don’t exist, not outside our heads. You couldn’t possibly.” Martha, appearing in a chair on Jack’s left, smoothes back a piece of her hair and crosses her legs demurely at the ankle. “That’s why we have to leave. It’d just be silly to go on pretending.” She leans forward, resting an elbow on the table. “We’re not children any longer, you know,” she says, not unkindly. “You can’t expect us to stay.”  
  
The Doctor swallows hard, the roar of the ocean in his ears. “I wish you would.”   
  
Jack crosses his arms over his chest. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”  
  
“If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side,” Martha says. She turns to Jack. “Speak of the devil, do you have the time?”  
  
Jack chuckles. “I have all the time in the world, doll. I’m Eternal.”  
  
She nods politely, her chin resting on her hand. “How nice for you. Is that just a title, or does it come with a hat?”  
  
The Doctor’s feet are wet. He looks down to find seawater surging up from between the wooden floorboards, brine and foam swirling around his feet, his ankles, his knees. Kelp twines about his legs as the dining room disappears beneath the waves. The sea has followed him here.   
  
“Martha!” he cries, panic lending his voice an unusual sharpness. “Jack, where are you?” The water has risen to his waist, and he struggles against the current, fighting to reach them.   
  
A wave rolls past, and on the crest ride Martha and Jack. He watches in amazement as they bob calmly by, still seated in their wooden chairs. Martha sips from a china tea cup and winces; without speaking, Jack leans across the space between them and passes her a sugar bowl. She adds a spoonful to her cup and takes another drink, seemingly oblivious to the seawater lapping at her knees. She turns to the Doctor and smiles. “We haven’t believed in stories like you for such a long time. It was lovely of you to stop by, though.”  
  
The sea overtakes him, and he is swallowed by darkness.   
  
A rush of current and he is nightmare blind, falling, drowning in air and the dark. His fingers scrabble for purchase on tattered wallpaper as he hurtles downward through hollow corridors, past doors and rooms forgotten. Then his knees hit wooden floorboards, his palms slap against the wall, and everything stops. For a moment, it is so silent. So still. He does not breathe.  
  
“I can’t see,” he murmurs, though there is no one to hear. “Why can’t I–”  
  
The first scream he doesn’t even recognise as a human voice. It’s just noise — shattering, desperate. The second moves him to his feet and he stumbles down the corridor in the dark _(in his blindness)_ , reaching for light, for doorframes, for the next person he needs to save. The third and he knows he is too late — he’s well enough acquainted with life to recognise the sound of its passing.   
  
But he is wrong. The scream turns to sobs, the sobs to words, and he stops, his ear pressed to the wall. He listens.   
  
“I’ll kill you,” she says, wracked with pain, and he hears the blood thick in her throat. “I’ll fucking kill you and after you die and come back I’ll fucking kill you again.” She chuckles darkly, weakly. “Unless you come back really ugly. Then I’ll take pictures and laugh.”  
  
Rose screams again, high and raw, and he hears it in his bones and his skin and he fumbles futilely for the doorknob, cursing the darkness because it is happening again and again he cannot _see_ –  
  
“Please,” she says, weeping, “ _please_ don’t. I’ll give you, I’ll tell you anything, anything you want, just let me go. Please let me go.” Her voice is small, distant, and he follows it down the corridor to another door, another room. Another Rose. He throws himself against the wood, but the door will not yield. “I can help you,” this new Rose continues, begging, and he has never heard her like this. “The Doctor — he trusts me. Cares about me. I can hurt him. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Him, not me.” She sobs, undone. “ _Please_.”  
  
The doorknob rattles in his hands as he tries to force his way into the room, the sonic screwdriver dark and useless. He feels himself shaking, feels his stomach clench, acid and revulsion and horror _(once upon a time, there was a girl–)_ surging in the back of his throat like vomit _(I forgive you, he’d said, and meant it)_ , and still the door will not open.   
  
He hears her cry out, a thin wail from a distant room. He runs blindly, sliding over smooth wooden floors, until he reaches her voice — another door, another lock. She gives a wordless cry and he listens, ear to the door, as she strains for breath, air leaving her lungs in rhythmic grunts as if she is being struck again and again.  
  
“Oh god,” the Rose behind this door moans, her voice breaking. “Oh god, oh god, oh _yes_ –”  
  
The Doctor reels back, staggering into the wall behind him. “No,” he says, his voice a whisper. Then, fiercely: “ _Enough_.”  
  
There is silence.   
  
Light spills across the floor and he finds himself at the foot of a long staircase. It leads to an open door, to sunlight.   
  
He climbs the stairs and steps out into open sky, onto the widow’s walk perched on the roof of the house, the pale blue paint of its floorboards and railings corroded by years of ocean air. Rose stands with her back to him, feet bare and hair tangled, looking out to sea.   
  
“Once upon a time,” she says, “there were two boys. They were friends, the way boys often are, and though they were very different, they were very much the same. When they became men, they left their homes and their families, striking out — one to the east, the other to the west — to find their fortunes. Both traveled far, and both saw wondrous, horrible things. Both _did_ wondrous, horrible things.” She pauses, the wind in her hair. “They were not friends any longer.”   
  
He stands behind her, his hands in his pockets. Not touching her. “Rose.”  
  
She laughs a little, tucking her hair behind her ear, and does not look at him. “You know, I love you a lot, but you’re sort of stupid.”  
  
He looks at the floor and smiles. “Can’t really argue with that.”  
  
“A rare moment of humility. It’s almost disturbing.” She turns away from the sea and brushes her fingers over his lapel, her eyes on his. They are wide and impossibly old. He looks to her mouth _(to her lips)_ and there is steel in her smile. “I have a riddle for you.”  
  
“That’s a surprise.” He leans into her hand. “It’s not the one with all those sacks and cats, is it? ‘Cause that always was a bit beyond me.”  
  
She skims her fingernails over the knot of his tie, yellow varnish against blue silk. Her smile fades. “He died.”  
  
The Doctor swallows, but the sudden sharpness in his throat stays. “Yes.”   
  
“You wanted to save him.”   
  
“Yes.”   
  
“Because you thought he could save you.” She smiles again, and he feels it like a knife blade. “You killed them all. All of them except him.” She touches his face. “Doctor, nobody wants to be alone.”   
  
He looks to the grey sky above, breathes deeply and tastes salt. “Except hermits.”  
  
“Yes,” she agrees, her voice warm. “Except hermits.” She rests her head against his shoulder, her cheek over his left _(human)_ heart, and his hands settle at her waist. For a moment, it is almost as if they are dancing. “Tell me a story,” she says, and he closes his eyes.   
  
“Once upon a time,” he says, because that is how you begin, “there was a girl.”   
  
“Ooh,” she murmurs into his chest, “good start.”  
  
He pinches her side and she laughs. “A very cheeky, very _annoying_ girl. She had a very loud, very annoying mum, a very dull job in a shop, and an idiot boyfriend.”   
  
“But then one day, something wonderful happened.”  
  
He pinches her again. “Excuse me, who’s telling this story?”   
  
She hides her grin against his suit coat. “You, sir. Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again, sir.”  
  
“I should hope not.” With great dignity, he continues. “Then one day, something wonderful happened. Actually, a lot of wonderful things happened — and lot of terrible things, and a few things that are probably best described as being somewhere in between — and soon the girl was lost deep in the dark of the forest, far from the path. Far from home.”   
  
Rose sighs. “And she loved it.”  
  
He rests his chin on the top of her head. “Yes,” he says, his voice thick. “Yes, she did.” He grins, for a moment fiercely happy. “She ran to the stars, a lost little girl, and she did wondrous, horrible things — saved worlds and ended wars and completely massacred my second-best toaster–”  
  
She punches him in the arm. “Oi! I’m not the one who–”  
  
“–and she was nearly lost for good a hundred thousand different times, in a hundred thousand dark places, but, in the end, she survived.” His grip on her waist tightens. “That’s the part of the story you must remember. Because she does. She survives.”  
  
“Does she?” Rose muses. “Sometimes I wonder.” She hums softly under her breath. It is a tune he does not recognise, and it makes him cold. “You want to know what happened that day. What he did to me.”   
  
She says it so simply, and he cannot breathe. “Yes.”  
  
Rose pulls away, hands on his chest, and looks into his eyes. “You can’t. Not ever.”   
  
“I could go back,” the Doctor says, and it sounds like a threat. Like the madness it is. “Easiest thing in the world — just a matter of setting the coordinates. Manhattan, 17th August, 2007. I could follow you into that shop, Rose, and I could stop him.”  
  
Her jaw tightens. “You wouldn’t.”   
  
“I would.” He smiles, showing teeth, and it feels as if something inside him is breaking. “There’s no one left to stop me.”  
  
For a moment, her expression _(the hard twist of her mouth, the dip of her too-dark eyebrows)_ is a foreign, unreadable thing to him, needing translation. Then, like a slap to the face, he understands — she is furious. So much time spent grieving her loss, and in that time he forgot she ever looked at him with anything but a smile in her eyes.  
  
Then the anger is gone, evaporated, and in its place waits a feral, affectionate grin. “ _No one_?” she repeats, voice sweetly mocking. She begins to laugh, and it sounds like the sea. “Oh, Doctor,” she says, golden and fierce. “You’d be surprised.”  
  
She skips away from him then, feet bare against grey cement, stopping at the brick barrier between the roof of the Powell Estate and the deadly drop to the city streets below. Behind her, early 21st century London gleams under a blue sky. The house by the sea is gone, but he can still hear the waves against the shore.  
  
“Tell me a story,” she calls to him, tongue curling over her teeth. “Tell me how you save the little lost girl this time, Doctor. Do you want to be her noble huntsman? Her humble woodcutter, who just happens to be strolling by with a nice, sharp axe?” Her head tips to one side, her smile wry. “Her knight on a white horse?”   
  
The Doctor follows her, but she dances out of his reach, still smiling. He lets his empty hands drop to his sides. “That’s enough, Rose.”  
  
“Oh no, sir. Not nearly, sir, not nearly enough. _You_ , sir,” she says, poking him hard in the chest, “have forgotten the story.”   
  
He knocks her hand away. “It’s not a story,” he bites out, and she giggles, wisps of her hair blowing into his face.   
  
“To you, that’s all it is. All it’ll ever be. Because you’ve forgotten.” She leans into him, as if to whisper a precious secret in his ear. “Bottles and eggs, the moon and the sea — all nonsense, pretty as it is. They’re just words, and you’ll forget them, but listen, _listen_ : one for sorrow, two for joy. Three for a girl, four for a boy.” She presses her lips to his cheek, her mouth chaste and sweet and burning cold. “Hidden in rhymes and riddles, it waits.” She steps back, smiling. “You won’t see it coming.”   
  
He takes her by the shoulders, holds her still and looks into her unfathomable eyes. His fingers bruise. “What is it, Rose? What won’t I see?”  
  
She looks back at him, serene. “Once upon a time, there was a girl, and she was lost. A man found her. His hands were cold. He laughed, and she wept.”  
  
He closes his eyes, but her pale face follows him, burning against the darkness of his eyelids. “Rose,” he says, and it feels like prayer.   
  
“But you’ve forgotten what comes next. You always do.” She brushes her fingers over his brow, a benediction. “When,” she says softly, “is a lost girl not a lost girl?”   
  
She waits, and he opens his eyes. “Tell me.”  
  
“Well, when she’s a wolf, of course.” Then she grins, and he sees the sun.  
  
She laughs, blue jumper and golden hair and dark, dark eyes, and the sky beyond her is in flame. The city of London burns and Rose spins out of his reach, jumping up onto the ledge of the building. She balances there for a heart stopping moment, her hair aglow in the citylight and floating around her face like a halo. “Good night, Doctor,” she says. “Sleep tight.” And then she falls.   
  
The Doctor stands, unmoving. Barely breathing. “Oh,” he says faintly. “I’m dreaming.”  
  
A hand claps him hard on the back. “By Jove, I think he’s got it!” The Master’s grinning face pops into view, and the Doctor stumbles backward. “Finally. Do you have any idea how unbearably dull it is in here? Well, you probably do, it being your brain and all, but really. I was about to do something desperate, like crash the weekly UNIT Scrabble tournament or help your Miss Jones wax her bikini line, but I’d much rather gal pal around with you.” The Master sits on the roof ledge and peers down the sheer face of the Powell Estate. “Oh, ew,” he says, grimacing with delight. “There’s blonde all over the pavement. And no one’s even bothering to clean it up. Just disgusting the way these people live, isn’t it?”   
  
The Doctor swallows, hard. “Master.”  
  
“But did you see that exit? The girl’s got flare, I’ll give her that. Though,” the Master pauses, frowning, “it does seem as if that nasty god complex of yours is catching. The phony omniscience and all that glowing just before she went splat — I can only imagine she caught that little eccentricity from you.” He places a hand over his right heart, his expression pained. “You know, I’m more than a bit concerned for my own mental well-being.”   
  
“You’re already psychotic,” the Doctor points out. “How much worse could it get?”  
  
The Master sighs. “Oh, sure. Kick a man when he’s dead.”  
  
“Down.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Kick a man when he’s down.”  
  
“Right.” The Master grins. “That too.”   
  
The Doctor’s fingers curl into fists. “Why are you here?”   
  
“Well,” the Master says, tapping out a jaunty rhythm against his kneecaps, “I came for the brutal psychological torture, but I stayed for the late nights spent talking about everything and nothing, the Sundays in the park, that naughty thing you do with the pencil when you’re working on a crossword–”  
  
“If I ever bothered with a crossword, I’d do it in ink.”  
  
The Master winks. “Of course you would, pookie.” Then he stands and gives the Doctor a brilliant, shit-eating grin. “I’m here, old friend, because you want me here.” He turns to look out over the holocaust consuming the city, a dark figure silhouetted by flame. “I could burn every sky on every world you’ve ever seen, and you would still want me here. I could make her weep blood, and you would embrace me like a brother.” The Master slips behind him, standing at his shoulder, mouth at his ear. “Now, I’m certainly no expert, but tell me, Doctor, tell me true: is that good? Is that _right_?”   
  
The Doctor closes his eyes, shaking. It is all he can do not to recoil. “We’re all that’s left.”  
  
The Master laughs, the sound of waves against sand. “Oh no,” he says. “Not anymore.” He rests his hands on the Doctor’s shoulders and whispers: “One for sorrow, two for joy. Three for a girl, four for a boy. Five for silver, six for gold–” The Master chuckles, low and wry. “And seven for a secret, never to be told.”   
  
The Doctor opens his eyes, and together they watch as the world burns.   
  
His old friend squeezes his shoulder, fingers like iron. “I’m here,” he says, and is gone.  


 

  
  
The Doctor woke to an empty ship, the dream forgotten before he opened his eyes.  


 

  
  
Worlds away, Jackie Tyler rests on tired knees before a child’s bed. “Sweetheart,” she says, brushing the fringe from her son’s eyes, “it’s long past your bedtime.”  
  
The boy wriggles impatiently beneath his blankets. “But she promised me a story. She did.”  
  
Jackie sighs. “I know, love.” She straightens the sheets, looking to wrinkles and creases and not her young son’s face. “Rose wants to be here, she does, but she has responsibilities. Plenty of worries, our Rose.” A shadow passes over her face, and it is pushed aside as quickly as it had come. “Tomorrow night, love. She’ll be here tomorrow night.”   
  
“She promised,” the boy mutters, even as his eyelids flutter closed.   
  
“Good night, sleep tight,” Jackie says softly, reciting old, familiar words. “Wake up bright in the morning light–” She touches her lips to his forehead. “To do what’s right, with all your might.”   
  
She rises to her feet and steps back toward the open door.   
  
“Thank you, Mum,” Rose says from the doorway, her voice low, almost unrecognizable. “I know you hate to lie to him.”  
  
Jackie gives her eldest a hard look. “Yeah. I do.”  
  
Rose turns away, her exhaustion written on her face in shadows. “I just…I couldn’t tonight. Tomorrow will be better.”  
  
“I’m sure it will, sweetheart.” Jackie walks past her, standing in the dim light of the corridor. “I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong,” she says, and sounds so very old. “I wish you’d let me help.”  
  
Rose gives a strange, strangled little laugh. “You do help, Mum. You really do. But I can’t–” She pauses, and looks back to her brother’s dark bedroom. “You’ve forgotten the nightlights,” she says, her face troubled, and slips into the room.   
  
Jackie watches from the hall. “He’s not afraid of the dark, Rose.”  
  
Rose turns the tiny knob under the lamp until her brother’s face glows warmly in its light. She smiles. “Lucky him.”  
  
She presses her fingers to her lips _(red nail varnish like blood against her too pale skin)_ and, touching them to his cheek, wishes her baby brother a dreamless sleep.  


  
  
And in the darkness, the wolf waits.


End file.
